A rake's progress

A self-confessed 'libertine by profession', Casanova's reputation as a sexual adventurer is a matter of legend. But far more important, argues Ian Kelly in this extract from his new biography, is the way he wrote about his adventures, providing early witness to the centrality of sex and sensuality in the understanding of the self

First, the bedpost notches: let's get them out of the way. In his History of My Life. Casanova records sexual experiences with well over a hundred women - 122 to 136, depending on how one computes certain group and semi-consummated experiences - and with a handful, as it were, of men. The history of his sex-life runs from the loss of his virginity, at seventeen, through the following thirty-five years covered in his memoirs; an average of, say, four partners a year. Although he lived twenty-four years beyond that, not without romantic adventures, it is reasonable to suggest that the history is a near-complete overview of his sexual prime, during which, by his estimation, he had "turned the heads" of several hundred women across Europe. Some, therefore, never made it into the History of My Life, any more than those he slept with after the "end" of the History, or the Venetian common-law wife with whom he settled down in his fifties. But while it would be fair to say that this incomplete tally was probably outside the norm then, as it might be now, a series of factors puts the number of sexual encounters in the History in a specific new context. Nor, in any case, is it the amount of sex that justifies Casanova's place in a history of it, but rather the manner in which he writes of it.

For what it is worth, some of Casanova's contemporary memoirists and diarists, from James Boswell to William Hickey and John Wilkes appear to record or refer to more sexual encounters than the man whose name is practically synonymous with serial womanising, and Lord Byron alludes to more conquests in a couple of years in the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice than Casanova did in an entire lifetime. Casanova was certainly very sexually active in his twenties and early thirties but, for an almost constantly travelling bachelor of his era and background, his sex life begins to appear more modest. In the classic eighteenth-century sense, Casanova is a poor example of a libertine in that he had so little interest in conquest or coercion. He was no Valmont or de Sade. He is outclassed ten to one by his fictional alter ego Don Giovanni with his catalogue of 1800 conquests. Casanova's is not a compulsion or sex addiction. Indeed, he might not register at all as having a "Casanova" complex in the sense in which the term is used today. Rather, he enjoyed the game of love and seduction, a sport or art of unsurpassed fashionability in the generation that preceded the French Revolution. He narrates affairs, rather than one-night stands. Romantically, he was indefatigable.

He paid for sex from time to time throughout his life but did so considerably less than seems to have been the norm at this period for many urban men. Nor did he put himself in the first rank of sexual athletes, some of whom he encountered and witnessed, any more than he accounted himself handsome, well endowed or of abnormal libido. He was aware that his singular interest in humankind, and womankind in particular, was considered unusual and attractive, and until his late thirties he proceeded in life and love in the unquestioning faith that for him, anything and anyone was possible; a credo that transubstantiates its own reality. That he was an attractive man has the witness of figures from the Prussian king Frederick the Great to Madame de Pompadour, connoisseurs of masculine beauty both. Yet he did not conform to ideals of sexual allure of that or any age. He had a large, beaked nose and bulbous, heavily lidded eyes, thick dark eyebrows and a swarthy complexion, minuses all in the lexicon of eighteenth-century ideals of beauty. He looked almost a caricature of an Italian, was uncommonly tall and unusually muscular for a man who never laboured at anything; there are also references to the thickness of his neck and the prominence of his Adam's apple, which suggest a solid man; a manly man for all he swathed himself in lace. Despite his bulk he moved, it was said, like a dancer; unsurprising, when his family were all in the theatre. At his prime, his only boast was that he was convinced he - or any man - could conquer any woman, if she was the sole object of his undivided attention. He focused completely on those he was with, a sort of charm in itself, and perhaps an unusual experience for women in the eighteenth century.

That said, he was aware - when he was writing towards the end of his life - that his sentimental, romantic and sexual journeys had been at least as adventurous as his travels, and he turned his pen often to matters of the heart and loins. Of all the sensory aspects of his writing it was romance that had amused, confused and enervated him most. His memoirs come alive when he is on his favourite subject - sex. For sheer numbers, pornography or extremes of taste, one must look elsewhere, to de Sade, or to the indefatigable Lords Lincoln or Byron. It is Casanova's unjudgemental overview of his life and times, including sex, that makes him worthy of study in terms of the history of sexuality. Without apology or blush he ranked his sexual and romantic adventures on a par with the rest of his intellectual, professional and geographic odyssey, the first great writer of the modern period to do so.

How typical was Casanova of his era? The question hinges between the man and his times. While putting Casanova's sex life in context and making a case for its singular importance because of his writings about it, it would be disingenuous to avoid his framing of his life in love affairs, his overarching narrative of romance and his fascination with sex. That he relates his fears and failures is less well known. He expressed extreme concern about disappointing a lover or losing an erection. He suffered premature ejaculation. He noted a decline in his interest in sex from his late thirties and enumerated a series of encounters when he turned down the offer of a bedmate. He suffered at least six gonorrhoea infections or outbreaks, possibly eleven, which led to long periods of abstinence. His History also suggests that by the end of his life he was suffering from syphilis. His long prescription from the German venereologist Dr Peiper on his return from Russia appears to address the uncomfortable undertow to the travelling libertine's tale - haemorrhoids, anal and possibly genital chancres, and warts.

The risks he and his contemporaries took may shock today but speak equally of a compulsion, linked to his womanising, his gambling and his travelling; a desire Casanova had to take risks, and to feel himself punished. His self-administering periods of enforced solitude and "clean-living" - with which he treated his gonorrhoeal urethritis - coincided with his first periods of writing and self-reflection. Later still his syphilitic depression also informed the pattern of his literary endeavours. His sexual memoir, like his sex life, was shaped by a more vivid and dangerous world than ours where a libertine's overstated sexual machismo risked radical punishment: disease, genital mutilation, impotence, death. His writing sought meaning, a story of a life framed in sensuality, but there was also a rake's progress in contemplation of risk.

In further regards the sexual landscape in which Casanova moved was different from our own, perhaps never more so than in attitudes to children's sexuality, and to sex between adult men and young girls. Privacy as it related to human functions was impossible in eighteenth-century cities. Children were exposed daily to the sight of adult flirtation and even sexual activity, certainly in Venice, and Casanova found little difference in this between the back-streets of London's Soho and the court at Versailles. He and his contemporaries were also bombarded with images of sexualised children - the "nice big omelette of infants" in the paintings of Fragonard and his ilk, as lampooned by Diderot. There was more naked child flesh in the paintings, frescos, sculpture and decorative arts of the period than any other representation of human corporeality. This reflected an attitude wildly different from our own. Neo-classicism, in its rococo form, harked back to an aspect of ancient civilisation obsessed with Eros, and images of putti, amorini, cupids: the anarchic spirit of sex represented in naughty children. Casanova expressed in his memoirs both the wrongness of what would today be termed paedophilia, but also an erotic vista he shared with his contemporaries, which included young girls. It is difficult to assess the ages of some of the girls and women with whom Casanova had sex. There is no doubt, however, that he regarded those in their early teens as fair game and, more, a connoisseur's prize. This was in keeping with contemporary attitudes: Casanova notes that Lady Harrington's daughters were considered suitable for the London marriage market in 1763, including her thirteen-year-old.

This was all the more the case in the demi-monde and sex-trade, where such huge prices were put upon actual and near-virginity that madams in London and Paris were known to have numerous tricks available to fake intact hymens. On the one hand, some of these country girls in city bagnios must have been victims of the grossest form of human trafficking. On the other, in terms Casanova might have understood, an "education d'amour" - the first sexual experiences of a young woman - might just empower them in a harsh era of the sexual economy. From Casanova's point of view, the only redemptive feature of what he confessed to Feldkirchner was a "compulsion" to seduce virgins - in a letter that has only recently come to light - was that he may have believed he could save them from the worst of what might befall them, by treating them more kindly than most, as sexual equals who could thence use their power over men for as long as it lasted. In modern times, Casanova would, of course, be considered a criminal.

Casanova was, first and foremost, a Venetian, and this is never more so than in his attitude to sex. There was a different concept of personal space in Venice. It was then probably the most densely populated city in the world. At its historic core it remains, architecturally and geographically, a city that demands a complete realignment of modern ideas of privacy and interpersonal relations. Lovemaking, snoring, arguing and laughing are clearly audible across small canals and smaller calles, even with the additions of glass and air-conditioning. Then only the masks, and covered gondolas "like floating double beds" created small oases of privacy. This, with the related fact that Casanova's earliest sexual experience was with two sisters, helps to explain a recurrent motif of sexual encounters that might seem, to modern eyes, somewhat public. From Nanetta and Marta, to the Greek girl with whom he coupled in full view of Bellino, to his long-standing ménage with Caterina Capretti, M.M. and de Bernis, then his voyeuristic enjoyment of, and later participation with, his Roman landlady's daughter and her well-endowed tailor, all feature as signals in his sexual odyssey. Casanova was instinctively serially monogamous but was repeatedly allured by or inveigled into experiences that tended towards a more communal enjoyment of sex. Sexual intrigue was heightened through the voyeuristic gaze, an endlessly iterated theme in the art as well as the pornography and erotic literature of the period. Because the game was half clandestine, half witnessed, in a semi-staged tradition, Casanova behaved within the confines of much of the erotic literature of his day - part of what made his writing suspect to some.

The voyeuristic aspect to Casanova's sex life and his recording of it may be seen in this Venetian light, but also reflects erotic literary concerns of the period. Libertine novels that preceded Casanova's sentimental memoir inform our understanding of this aspect of his sex life also. Fictional pornography, such as La Putain Errante, L'Academie des Dames and Venus dans le Cloitre, foreshadowed some of his erotic experience with nuns and schoolgirls - a prefiguring that is one function of erotica in the first place. If any theme typifies the libertine writings of the period, though, it is voyeurism, and Casanova was, so far as it is possible to tell, reflecting in his practice what was written and thought of as the language of desire. Everywhere in libertine tales, characters observe each other from behind muslin and masks, through keyholes or spyholes, in gardens or via mirrors. All styles are to be found in Casanova's sexual narrative. And it is the style of eighteenth-century Venice - half hidden, furtive, a world of mirrors, grilles and semi-obscured identity. It gave, as one cultural historian has written, "an air of theatricality to the whole business [of sex]. Sex, in the livres philosophiques was rococo."

It is an item of record, from The History of My Life and Casanova's notes, that he had sexual relations with men. This is not part of his "legend" and certainly makes up only a small part of his sexual experience. It is telling of the man, but his handling of the material, his literary relationship with what would now be termed his bisexuality, is telling too. He was open, frank and exhaustive in his detailing of heterosexual experiences, but covert, circumspect and oblique when it came to sex with men. The notes found after his death included intended passages on affairs with a man called "Camille", the Duc d'Elboeuf, a known homosexual, and the famous mention of "Pédérastie avec X. à Dunquerque"; here, historians have noted Casanova's need to disguise the name of someone important when he was working clandestinely for the French government. Meanwhile, as the memoirs show, he had sex frequently in the company of other men, but also more direct, intimate and exclusive homosexual contact in Turkey, Russia and elsewhere. It was not an area, however, that he was comfortable with as a writer, and it seems not to have attracted him especially.

There is a school of thought that Casanova's womanising might indicate a counter-phobia, a misogyny or even latent homosexuality, as may be the case with some serial womanisers. In conforming, to some extent, to the genre of libertine memoir and expectation of him as an "adventurer", Casanova was at liberty to detail the dehumanising trade in sex and favours that was a clear part of the theatre economy and eighteenth-century cityscape. But he was not at ease with expressing the totality of his experience. "Why did you refuse Ismail [in Turkey]," repined de Ligne, over his friend's apparent lack of candour, "neglect Petronius and rejoice that Bellino was a girl?" De Ligne wanted all the details. Casanova was unusually guarded. Little else in his notes has been left out of the finished memoir. Casanova, who censored so little and told so much drew a curtain over an area of sexuality that was being colonised by politics, prurience and censure.

In every other regard his History furnishes one of the most fulsome, unabashed and unapologetic accounts of a sex life, from his own or any other period. Perhaps he felt the need to touch so many as a way to feel more alive: the memoirs often seem written in a yearning key but, then, they were written by an old and lonely man. Whatever inspired him to dedicate quite such energy to the pursuit of a very eighteenth-century style of loving is not necessarily as interesting as his testimony to the centrality of sex and sensuality in one construction of self, one appreciation of living.